In the digital age, organizations increasingly rely on digitally-stored data. To protect against data loss, an organization may use a backup system to back up important data. For example, an organization may create and store a disk image as a backup of a disk.
Business continuity and disaster recovery refers to the capability to restore normal (or near-normal) business operations, from a critical business application perspective, after the occurrence of a disaster that interrupts business operations. Business continuity and disaster recovery may require the ability to bring up mission-critical applications and the data these applications depend on and make them available to users as quickly as business requirements dictate.
In order to facilitate business continuity, some organizations may wish to use backup disk images within virtual machines in failover scenarios. However, security practices may prevent these organizations from copying unencrypted backup disk images to offsite locations. Unfortunately, decrypting encrypted backup disk images when failover situations arise may cost valuable time and undermine business continuity goals. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for securely storing backup data while facilitating fast failovers.